Six years ago, I was promoted to the rank of deputy editor at American Family Physician. On the whole, I continue to find translating the latest scientific evidence into continuing medical education for family physicians and trainees to be satisfying and intellectually rewarding. As I pass the likely midpoint of my career, I have achieved all of my editorial goals, save one. In pursuit of that goal, in March 2023 I applied for the position of editor-in-chief at The Journal of Family Practice, a widely respected primary care journal for nearly 50 years (AFP will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2025) whose editor's chair had been vacated by the sudden passing of the legendary family physician educator John Hickner, MD. I began reading JFP during my residency 20 years ago, and its editorial board still included the same faculty mentor (now retired) who launched my editing career by urging me to write a clinical review article for AFP. The timing seemed favorable for me to climb the last rung of the editorial ladder.
Alas, not only was another very well-qualified candidate selected instead, but in November, JFP permanently ceased publication for financial reasons. It happened so abruptly that the journal had a backlog of accepted but unpublished articles that would need to find new homes elsewhere; I'm happy to share that a few of them will appear in future issues of AFP. In the January issue of Family Medicine, Dr. John Frey penned an eloquent "curtain call" for JFP:
A superior group of editorial board members guided publication of research on topics that still are the source of much of the literature in the discipline and philosophical and intellectual articles by some of the most important writers and researchers in the first 20 years of family medicine’s existence. That the journal continued to publish after shifting from a primary research journal to a quality review journal, and managed to survive as long as it did is a tribute to the integrity and hard work of the many distinguished academic editors over its history. ... JFP was one of the principal reasons that family physicians, who were unused to reading primary sources of clinical research, began to change both by reading and contributing to the scholarship of a new field.